Politics, Economics, Culture, and Theology with a Biblical Viewpoint

Archive for the tag “american”

I’ve been reading a lot of works by and about the great Southern author, Flannery O’Connor, as you can tell by another recent post of mine. I recently had a chance to read and contemplate one of her short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

That this story is a critique of the conflation of being American and being Christian should be recognizable, but O’Connor’s subtlety may be just enough for some readers to miss it. Many Americans tend to identify as people who believe in God, maybe even in Christ, just by virtue of the cultural milieu of their day. Americans believe in God, I am an American, therefore I believe God. You can even hear an Aristotelian syllogism in that.

This kind of American Christianism, however, is not incarnated in the life of these Americans. This Christianism is something you assent to, mentally, but it doesn’t affect the way you think or act. Jesus is a word that is used only in the church building–unless you’re angry–and your faith is something you do on Sundays or maybe even just with your heart.

In the best sense of the term, this has been a very patriotic weekend for me. It began on Thursday evening at the Banquet for Life hosted by Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor is a ministry the saints of Providence have invested in for quite a few years. It is more than just another pro-life ministry, it is a labor that saw 162 women this past year choose life rather than live with the blood of the innocent in their hands for the rest of their lives. They provide counseling, medical help, and the environment to best guide confused young women out of their present chaos.

At their annual fundraising banquet they invited Senator Rick Santorum. Santorum was still living off the energy of last year’s election. The Senator from Pennsylvania shocked the nation by losing to Mitt Romney by only eight votes in Iowa and going on to win several other primaries. Though Santorum was no match for the prosperous GOP establishment candidate, the Senator was still able to leave a lasting impression in the GOP Primary.

Santorum observed in his speech that though he had opined continuously on the state of the economy and on other pertinent matters, the media chose not to pursue the Senator’s opinion on these issues, but rather focus on some of his more “extreme” ideas. Ideas like opposition to abortion, which according to the general American public are far from extreme. Yet, we are at such a stage in the civil discourse that when anyone speaks passionately about any moral issue, he is already termed a radical. To hell with logic! Read more…

Exceptionalism is a flag that a hopeful politician in America can hardly afford to keep at half mast. Hesitation on America’s greatness gets you names – at best, “isolationist”; at worst, “unpatriotic.”

Some sail the ship of political showmanship by insisting that America has it’s own proud circle on the charts in the back of your grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible. Read more…

It is abundantly clear to most folks by now that President Barack Obama has claimed the authority to kill American citizens without a trial. One of the qualifications for such a determination is that the person have posed “an imminent threat” to the United States. The same Department of Justice (leaked) document that exposed all of this also says that the government is not required to “have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.”

Some have responded by noting that this just makes it more important to elect the right president in future elections. Surely we want to elect someone who won’t decide that WE are an imminent threat!

This just misses the real point, though, doesn’t it? Responding in this way simply concedes that the government has the authority to make such declarations and judgments. It makes the Executive Branch not just judge, jury, and executioner, but also legislator. The point is not to vote in the person who will do the least harm with authority he shouldn’t have, but to elect someone who will acknowledge and give up the supposed authority the office had previously claimed.

The point, moreover, is that the Church and the Christians who constitute her need to speak prophetically to such abuses of power and false claims on authority that only the Triune God can exercise and delegate. And, we must do these things regardless of whether the Supreme Court–which sits comfortably in the pocket of the Executive–says the Executive has this right Constitutionally or not.